Know When to Fold 'em

Changes are brewing here, and we're sending the boys to a new school. Wrapping my head around the events that got us here, I wrote this last week. I'll post the update in the next day or two.

Three, it's a magic number. That's what everyone told us anyway.

As a child, our friend Andrée lived for a year in France when her father was on sabbatical. She spent the first three months in school mute and then busted out in perfect French.

A nursing student who babysat for us last year waxed poetic about her time in the Netherlands in elementary school. She left without any knowledge of Dutch and came home fluent. “It took about three months,” she told us.

And Karl's mother, Char, an ESL teacher of many years, said something clicks for kids after three months' time in an immersion situation. “Christmas, it all comes together around Christmas.”

I could go on. But none of that really matters when it's not coming together for your kid.

Ben –– we learned recently –– has really been struggling with school. He got into a downward spiral situation which involved other kids in the class actively excluding him from break-time activities and him shutting down and not participating in class. His teacher said he would eat during class (rather than break, when it was allowed), go to the bathroom many times, and sit in the knees-up position reading an English book. (He would not earn any checks for that!) She let him because she felt badly for him.

Garrett, on the other hand, seems to be on the verge of actually speaking Czech. Although he would claim differently, his teachers say that he communicates effectively, either in using very simple Czech (with beautiful pronunciation!) or hand gestures. He makes himself understood. And based on what he tells us about his school day, it's obvious he's absorbing more than what he would be observing visually.

But Garrett's class, kindergarten, is the perfect place for a child learning a new language. The schedule is very predictable. The agenda is all play, all day. (I'm sure there's more to it than that, but from a kid's point of view, that's the take home.)

In second grade, however, Ben has to sit through subjects such as science, Česky jazyk (Czech language), and social studies all in a different language. The only one he enjoys is math. It must be comforting that the numbers are the same.

Compounding the different environments are their wildly different temperaments. Garrett is social, gregarious, not too afraid to take risks –– in other words well suited to pick up a new language. Ben is much more internally focused, intellectual and precise, a bit shy.

We're three months into the academic year. Ben is miserable when he's at school, a fact we did not understand fully until last week. We knew he wasn't happy about the set up, but he didn't talk about school at home. And at home he was very content.

We've gone back and forth on this, but the bottom line is we want our children to enjoy this year. And so, we're pulling the plug on our cultural experiment at ZS Tusarova and looking into enrolling Ben and Garrett at one of the international schools.

I'm conflicted about this only because Garrett is right on the cusp of speaking Czech. And he actually enjoys school now, which wasn't the case back in October. His teachers tell us each day how much more he communicates than even the week before.

Should we have gone this route from the beginning? I don't know. I guess I'm glad we tried it, and equally glad that Karl and I are on the same page in recognizing the need to change.

This whole parenting thing is a big kick in the pants sometimes.